Weekly roundup: new academic year

After a vacation on Tuscany's beaches where I was totally disconnected from the Internet and work-related topics, I'm ready to start a brand new year, first with two weeks of consulting business in Siena and then with the Master's Degree program at Politecnico di Milano. I will also attend the Alta Scuola Politecnica program, an additional set of courses for the students selected in the top 7.5% ones of every ordinary course.

While I was away, some original articles of mine have been published, and they are listed here.
Selenium is not a panacea, which outlines the common issues encountered while using Selenium for acceptance testing of complex JavaScript-intensive applications.
Practical PHP Patterns: Database Session State, which discusses the storage of session data into a database compared with the more common solutions of using cookies or the server's memory.
Practical PHP Patterns: Gateway, which is a basic pattern for consuming an external resource in an object-oriented, testable way.
What paradigm should PHP applications embrace? is a poll which compares procedural, object-oriented and functional PHP functionalities. Feel free to express your vote.